You’ve got to hand it to some people. They are out there tackling the really big questions like; where did we come from? Why are we here? Does a lava lamp work in the gravity of Jupiter?

Yes, you read that right.

Don’t worry, this isn’t some government funded experiment wasting tax dollars by shooting lava lamp loaded rockets to the biggest planet in our solar system. Instead this is a home experiment created by Neil Fraser, a software engineer at Google, who wanted to see if the wax in a lava lamp would flow the same way on the heavy gravity on Jupiter.

So what did he do to prove this?

He created his own centrifuge out of a Meccano (kinda like an Erector Set) and a 12 volt motor that drives the device around at 42 RPMs. In his invention he placed a lava lamp with a camera and an Android mobile phone to measure the resulting G Forces. How did it work?

Despite a bug in the phone that under-read the amount of G Forces, the homemade centrifuge was able to drive the lava lamp to 3Gs and proved that if you wanted to have a hippy moment on Jupiter, your lava lamp would not be affected by the gravity.

Reader Comments

hodar

Wow .. he missed a chance for a gazillion dollar Gov’t grant for this research. After all, as the Gov’t knows … money is free. They have to do nothing to earn it, they aren’t held responsible for how they spend it, and if you over-spend your budget – there’s absolutely no penalty to pay, just print more.